With the Gaddafi regime on the verge of collapse, the world is waiting for the money shot - an image of a shackled or dead dictator paraded through the streets as a lowly criminal.

Australian Prime Minister Julia Gillard wants to see more, she wants to see the man brought before an international criminal court; a nice thought but looking through the history of fallen dictators, let's just say "justice" is pretty unlikely to happen.

Dead, deposed or distant is all you really have to hope for, so let's hope too much blood isn't spilled in getting one of these results.

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Apologising is a uniquely human action, it involves taking responsibility for a mistake and admitting you erred. In someways it also involves asking for forgiveness.

Kevin Rudd, Australia's former PM who was sacked by his own party last year, apologised last night for "killing" his Emissions Trading Scheme which he says brought about his downfall.

Whether this is true or not, his apology echoes another one he made in his first week in government. That "sorry" was to the aboriginal people of Australia who since British colonisation were oppressed, marginalied and literally stolen from their families. 

His apology in that instance was personal and was seen almost universally as a positive step towards reconciliation and healing. It didn't lead to a better livelihood for indigenous Australians and has to be seen now as a symbolic act without much substance behind it.

Hopefully this second apology for failing on climate change can lead to asking for real forgiveness by making some real progress.    . . read more

Tony Abbott, the self-styled ideological love-child of Bronwyn Bishop and John Howard has been playing some pretty petty party politics; stone-walling any Labor policy, regardless of its merits.

So step up Paul Keating, the ideological love-child of a brick wall and Jack Lang.

He has launched a vicious and burning attack on Abbott calling him an "intellectual nobody [with] no policy ambition", and the "poor man's John Howard".

Hard to disagree with, and hard to see how Abbott will slip out of the shadow of the anodyne if he doesn't start voting with Australia's, and not his interests in mind.  . . read more

The Australian Prime Minister, Julia Gillard, came out last week and made two gaffes at the Vietnam War Remembrance Day. The first was when she said that General Giap, Vietnam's iconic war hero, was dead. The second was when she said that the Vietnam War "is just a page in the history books".

Some of the actors might have passed on (not Giap, who turned 100 yesterday) but the history isn't dead. 

For the Vietnamese it hangs over everything, appearing in literallly every single state owned newspaper every day as if it happened yesterday. For veterans on either side it also seems inconsiderate to consign it to dead history, it is very much a living memory and it will live on, long after they've gone.

Maybe it would have been better to remember them by not saying it was time to forget.  . . read more